the offences, which, after all,
argued no heavier delinquency than a levity in examining his chance
authorities, and a constitutional credulity. Dr. Johnson's easiness of
faith for the supernatural, the grossness of his superstition in
relation to such miserable impostures as the Cock Lane ghost, and its
scratchings on the wall, flowed from the same source; and his
conversation furnishes many proofs that he had no principle of
resistance in his mind, no reasonable scepticism, when any disparaging
anecdote was told about his nearest friends. Who but he would have
believed the monstrous tale: that Garrick, so used to addressing large
audiences _extempore_, so quick and lively in his apprehensions, had
absolutely been dismissed from a court of justice as an idiot--as a man
incapable of giving the court information even upon a question of his
own profession? As to his credulity with respect to the somewhat
harmless forgeries of Psalmanazer, and with respect to the villainous
imposture of Lander, we imagine that other causes co-operated to those
errors beyond mere facility of assenting. In the latter case we fear
that jealousy of Milton as a scholar, a feeling from which he never
cleansed himself, had been the chief cause of his so readily delivering
himself a dupe to allegations _not_ specious, backed by forgeries that
were anything but ingenious. Dr. Johnson had a narrow escape on that
occasion. Had Dr. Douglas fastened upon him as the collusive abettor of
Lander, as the man whose sanction had ever won even a momentary credit
for the obscure libeller, and as the one beyond all others of the age
whose critical occupation ought most to have secured him against such a
delusion, the character of Johnson would have suffered seriously.
Luckily, Dr. Douglas spared him; and Johnson, seeing the infamy of the
hoax, and the precipice near which he stood, hastened to separate
himself from Lander, and to offer such reparation as he could, by
dictating that unhappy letter of recantation. Lander must have consented
to this step from hopes of patronage; and perhaps the obscure place of
slave-driver in the West Indies, in which he died (after recanting his
recantation), might be the unsatisfactory bait of his needy ambition.
But assuredly Lander could have made out a better case for himself than
that which, under his name, the Doctor addressed to the Bishop; it was a
dark spot in Dr. Johnson's life. A Scotsman, said he, must be a strange
o